Swarm Intelligence

various abdominal diseases such as appendicitis and nonspecific abdom-

inal pain. Some of the symptoms such as body temperature and white

blood cell count are continuous variables and are best represented as real

numbers. Other inputs such as the answer to the question “Have you

had your appendix removed?” are binary values. So the mix of symp-

toms includes real and binary numbers. This poses no trouble when

training a neural network, whether you use a more traditional approach

such as backpropagation or our favorite approach using particle swarm

optimization.

It can be very difficult to explain how a network has made the deci-

sion it has. As the information ...